I have some doubts that any significant amount of cryptomining is actually done in Siberia. Part of that would include a few questions of the definition of “Siberia”, a deep examination (i. e. a suggestion to google) people’s ideas of the weather condition at that hypothetical place, and maybe a comparison of efficiency of heating a typical rural Russian home with coal vs. burning coal to generate electricity to run GPUs, after transmission over sowjet-era grids.

Considering how cryptocurrencies seem to attract the get-rich-quick crowd, it’s impressive to see the levels of motivated reasoning they are capable of, since neither motivation nor reasoning alone seem to be among their usual strengths.